


How to Dig Your Own Grave

by flyingisland



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, M/M, Pining Lance (Voltron), Secondhand embarrassment, pornstar AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-03
Updated: 2018-06-03
Packaged: 2019-05-17 21:17:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,804
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14839319
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flyingisland/pseuds/flyingisland
Summary: The complete anthology, written from first-hand experiences and mortifying, soul-crushing interactions between Lance McClain and one very attractive neighbor.





	How to Dig Your Own Grave

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kalakauuas](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kalakauuas/gifts).



Lance considers himself to be a fairly carefree person. He doesn’t feel as though he allows himself to get tripped up by old mistakes or missed opportunities very often. A few times in his life, he’s been  _“that guy”_ , who’s told the ticket seller at the movie theater, “you too” after they’ve told him to enjoy his movie. More often than not, he’s the socially unfortunate sort of person who asks a girl out and she tells him, while texting, that she doesn’t have a phone.

He imagines that, on the scale from “uptight, nervous wreck” to “zen Buddhist in pursuit of enlightenment and true inner peace”, he’s probably tucked somewhere near the center of that line. He isn’t the sort of person that never allows bad situations to get to him, but he’s not the type of guy whose vast repertoire of failed endeavors keep him up late at night, either.

But despite the usual ease with which he accepts his varied social failures, there’s a file, of sorts, tucked away deep in the recesses of his mind. A catalog, so to speak, titled something simple, something specifically tailored to the particular brand of mental horror that these thoughts evoke. Something like,  _“The Forbidden Memories of When Lance Couldn’t Just Chill Out for Once in His Miserable Life.”,_ descriptive and straight to the point. Forward and honest, just how he likes to consider himself.

But this forbidden collection of his own miserable memories, it’s the complete chroniclization of his futile attempts to grow closer to a very specific neighbor—a very beautiful, untouchable man—and well...

Maybe these thoughts do sometimes keep him up at night, when he’s already too strung out and too anxious to stop them.

Each instance, each moment that led to the inevitable death of his already tender ego, labelled bright and bold in his brain with a brief summary of every uniquely terrible encounter.

On the nights when Lance can’t sleep—when he’s tossing and turning, living through every painstaking occasion that makes him wish at times like these that he could just dissipate into thin air—live as an amoeba in the oxygen or disintegrate like foam in the sea—

They always start and end in the exact same place.

With Takashi Shirogane, the one man who’s ever managed to knock Lance off of his pedestal more times than he’s been willing to get back up.

Takashi Shirogane: the only person in Lance’s dreadfully short, desolate existence who has ever been so ridiculously beautiful that he’s made all of Lance’s self-made humiliation totally worth it.

 

* * *

 

 **Instance #1** :  _Lance’s Neighbor is Famous on the Internet, but only with people who wouldn’t be willing to admit that they recognize him. And, well, also with Lance._

Lance’s first apartment is in a surprisingly nice complex—in a studio on the top floor of some swanky building, just in the heart of the city three blocks from his university campus, surrounded by the fanciest restaurants and vegan coffee shops that this area has to offer, the most expensive stores, and Lance’s unfortunate place of work (another expensive local business, of course. It’s a frou-frou little boutique specializing in selling overpriced purses to a surprisingly vast demographic of people dumb enough to shell out the cash for them).

Hunk, his childhood friend—renowned “good guy”, the same person who he’s been hanging out with ever since he was a kid—he helps him move from his mom’s house forty-five minutes into the belly of the city, talks with him about the steal that he got on this apartment, and the two of them joke around that maybe he’s gotten such a good price on the place because it’s, in some shape or form, haunted.

Lance pretends that this doesn’t bother him. He pretends that, for the first few nights that he sleeps in there alone, he won’t be attributing every stray creak and every leaky pipe gurgling from the bathroom to some sort of nefarious specter come to smother him where he sleeps.

But, for now, they goof off. Hunk tells him—sweaty and exhausted after lugging half of his things up the stairs, after passing fancy people in the halls who regard them as though they’re movers who don’t deserve a greeting, and after the two of them struggle with his couch for nearly twenty minutes before they finally manage to squeeze it through the door—that Lance owes him dinner after all of this is over. It’s only fair, but Hunk jokes about one of the restaurants down the street, as though one of their meals wouldn’t cost the entirety of his first month’s rent.

“Hey, sure, let’s do it,” Lance tells him, propping an elbow against the threshold of the door as he raises a bottle of water to his lips, “we can go there, fine, but you gotta help me move all of my stuff out again when I get evicted.”

Hunk laughs at that, wiping the sweat from his forehead.

“They give you like three months to get out after someone files to get you evicted,” Hunk tells him then, before the two of them make their way out to his car parked downstairs in the garage, and Lance loads his arms up with so many boxes that Hunk is sure that he’ll drop all of them before he reaches his place on the top floor.

They take the elevator this time, since all of Lance’s bigger furniture has already been lugged painstakingly into his place. Hunk is carrying a box filled to the brim with Lance’s new and old school books. Lance is carrying a crate filled with his CDs, his radio, and a cooking pot that he’s stuffed with all of the cutlery that his family had gathered together for him before he’d left.

He feels as though he’s vastly unprepared to be living on his own, but the commute from home, to school, to work every night took him nearly two hours, five days a week. The cost in gas alone had been more than he’ll be paying to live here. He knows that he’s better off this way.

His aunt had told him that, in time, within the first month, even, he would discover every new thing that he needed to buy for his place. He’d realize, when he reached for a kitchen sponge and discovered that he didn’t bring one—or when his toilet clogged, when his shower got dirty, when he needed something to dry off his hands after going to the bathroom—he’d make so many quick trips to the department store that he wouldn’t be missing many things for very long.

He allows Hunk to walk in front of him, watches Hunk’s feet shuffling over the hardwood around the edge of all of the things in his hands. He’s zoning out thinking about everything that he’s already collected, everything that he might have forgotten. He’s wondering how many things he can call home begging for, and how many things he’ll have to go out and buy on his own.

He isn’t paying close enough attention when Hunk dips to the side, excuses himself, and greets another body and another voice that, when Lance thinks back on this moment, he’ll realize that he should have been paying close enough attention to actually recognize from the start.

But without considering where he’s going, without giving his surroundings and his many neighbors in this building the attention that they surely deserve, instead, he crashes into the new body that’s joined the two of them in the hall—stumbling, tripping on impact, and tipping over just far enough that all of his CDs scatter around on the floor.

Before he apologizes, he’s ashamed now to admit that he curses. He spills everything in his arms, dropping to his knees and struggling to collect everything quickly enough that none of the snooty people here will have the time to step on any of it, or judge him for not moving to something more expensive or fancy than a bunch of twenty year old CDs and a busted up radio that his mom bought for him for Christmas when he was eight.

He’s scrambling to scoop up Limp Bizkit when he’s finally made aware of the fact that he definitely should have taken those first few moments of anger and annoyance to apologize for slamming into this other person instead, given that they’re going to be one of his neighbors who he’ll surely have to look at every day.

“Oh, wow, I’m so sorry,” the voice above him says softly, and abruptly, he’s aware that another person is leaning down in front of him and helping him collect his things, “I really should pay more attention to what’s going on, shouldn’t I? Please, let me help you.”

Lance sputters through a list of his own apologies, belatedly, face hot as he shoves as many of his things back into the crate as he possibly can before that second pair of hands can manage to grab them. He’s working at record speed, stammering over a flimsy excuse about wanting to move quickly because he has work tomorrow. Only once they get everything back into the appropriate boxes, does Lance give himself the opportunity to finally glance up at the person who’s both assisted him and accidentally screwed him over.

And, in that moment, Lance feels as though every ounce of breath has been knocked out of his heaving lungs. His fear, the confusing arousal—like a Pavlov dog hearing a bell before dinner, like a bird flying south when the weather gets too cold—Lance has only ever seen this face when he’s in a special kind of mood.

Despite the fact that his brain jams up, despite the fact that he finds a million excuses as to why this can’t possibly be who he thinks that it is and he must just be tired, this must just be a figment of his imagination—the perplexing, humiliating sensations still fill him, just as he’s conditioned himself to be filled.

He doesn’t like that metaphor very much at all, but given the current situation at hand, he excuses a little bit of suggestive talk in the face of such a bizarre predicament and such a handsome Adonis-in-the-flesh standing right in front of him.

He knows that face, that soft smile. He knows those eyes, so gentle and so dark, creased slightly at the edges—that weird haircut, the big, sculpted arms. He knows the slope of those wide shoulders into the tight cinch of a flat, chiseled belly. He knows those fingers, the smooth palms, the endless expanse of soft, milky skin.

He recognizes this man even with clothes on, and he barely stops himself in time before he says the name out loud.

“I’m Takashi Shirogane, by the way.” This apparent  _Takashi Shirogane_  helps him up, extending a hand to shake his. Lance’s grip is flimsy and clammy—akin to a dead fish, disgusting. Pathetic. His thoughts are whipping past him so quickly that he can’t even take a moment to search for discomfort in those soft, dark eyes.

_It’s Commander Ryou._

Lance doesn’t know him by Takashi—has maybe learned of it at one point during a curious internet search late in the night when he can’t sleep. Might have looked over it in a forum while scouring the internet for free download links before he’d gotten himself a job and decided that, surely, the most important thing to spend his money on was…

_Commander Ryou Takes a Load for the Troops._

_Commander Ryou Orders a Pizza with Extra Large Sausage._

_Commander Ryou: DP Commissioner._

They’re innocuous enough names that his mom had never suspected anything when she’d handed him his monthly letters—somewhere tucked between his cellphone bill and Netflix rentals. Somewhere, hiding among his things, the sole proof sans his internet history that would allude to the fact that Lance is one of those people, who have taken it upon themselves to get as much content from a specific porno actor as possible by paying for exclusive access, bonus content, and the HD versions of all of his favorite videos.

“You can call me Shiro, if you’d like.”

Commander Ryou is smiling at him now as though nothing weird is going on at all. He lets go of Lance’s hand, clapping him on the back, before dropping down to grab some of his things from the floor.

Lance recognizes this particular scene—Commander Ryou bending over in front of a random, seemingly faceless man to perform some generic, vaguely sexual task. Those chiseled muscles yielding under the weight of his wide, round hips, his biceps rippling and sometimes  _glistening_  with the wet slick of oil. Commander Ryou leaning forward to unzip his partner’s fly, to beckon them into his open lips, to take them down far into his throat before swallowing easily around the thick heat of them.

Lance clears his throat entirely too loud, snatching his things from  _Shiro’s_  arms with more vigor than he thinks is appropriate. A stray look in Hunk’s direction gains him nothing but a perplexed and thoroughly disgruntled look. He’s never been very bad with people, even the people who are just as criminally attractive as this guy. He knows that Hunk suspects that something is wrong, and he’s not sure if enlightening him will make himself look better or worse in Hunk’s eyes.

“T-thanks,” he practically squawks, waving the crate between himself and Commander Ryou—Shiro, dammit,  _Shiro_ —when Shiro offers to help him carry the rest of his things to his apartment, “I—I’m Lance, by… the way. I, uh, I just moved into apartment 5A. End of the hall, you—you know?”

He knows that Shiro must know. He lives here. He immediately feels like the universe’s biggest moron for tacking that last part on.

“Ah, I know of it,” Shiro says with an ethereal, time-stalling smile, placing his things gently into Lance’s arms and lingering for what Lance’s hyper vigilance reads as just a little bit too long, “I live next door in 5B, actually. So we’ll share the wall between our bedrooms. Please let me know if I’m ever too loud.”

Hunk will judge Lance for a lot of things later on, once Lance explains. He’ll judge Lance for cyber stalking a porn star. He’ll judge Lance for wasting twenty dollars a month on a subscription to Shiro’s website, just to watch his newest films immediately in their (high-definition, uncut, sometimes 360 view) glory.

He’ll judge Lance for getting so starstruck and so gooey in the knees. For shoving his foot so far into his mouth, for floundering in the face of another person, just because he’s spent many romantic nights alone with only his hand and his favorite reel of Commander Ryou’s greatest sex scenes.

But at the end of the night, before Hunk finishes helping him move in and takes a cab home to sleep off his own exhaustion, the greatest disappointment that he’ll find in Lance is what he says next, just before Shiro offers him a nervous laugh and dips around the corner towards the elevator. Surely, Lance thinks, to talk to their landlord about moving him to a room that’s not next to maybe the biggest disaster of a human being that he’s ever had the displeasure of meeting.

“Oh, do you invite guys back to your place often?”

No one knows how to respond to that. Shiro, widening his eyes and unleashing that musical laughter. Hunk, confused, but still reading the vibe here well enough that he groans and buries his face in his hand.

And Lance, for the first time in a long time, wishing nothing more than to melt into a puddle into the middle of the floor, boiling and bubbling somewhere between his CDs.

Surely, he thinks, finding the remains of him dried and crusted, wedged like old bubblegum between the plastic covers of Radiohead and Pixies might be the only fate befitting of a tremendous train wreck of a person, such as himself.

But, unfortunately, fate has bigger and more terrible plans in store for him. He doesn’t melt, doesn’t disintegrate, doesn’t magically poof away at the mercy of some particularly empathetic God.

He stays firmly put, and slowly, despondent and wilted under the weight of his own personal, carefully crafted Hell, he gathers his things more tightly in his arms, and legs it back into his apartment.

 

* * *

 

 **Instance #2** :  _Lance shares another romantic evening alone in his new apartment with his hand and a new Commander Ryou video. And his neighbor through the wall. Maybe the whole complex, and anyone else with ears._

A week after the unfortunate introduction to his most beloved fantasy, Lance learns two things about himself:

One: He should never meet his heroes. Not because they’ll disillusion him, but because somehow, some way, he’ll always manage to make an ass out of himself in the most humiliating way possible.

And two: For whatever reason, the recent addition of Commander Ryou as a tangible, living and breathing human being and a semi-permanent fixture in his life just on the other side of his bedroom wall hasn’t stopped him from lusting after the guy. If anything, he’s noticed, he’s been watching somehow even more of Shiro’s videos—and only managing to feel the slightest bit guilty about it.

Hunk had asked him, laughing, how soon after he’d met Shiro that he’d deleted his subscription. And he’d been horrified, despite how long he’s known Lance, to learn that Lance had watched Shiro’s new upload just the next evening after work.

 _“I’m not going to give up my hobby just because I live next door to the guy!”_  Lance had howled, catching himself as his pitch had amplified in his kitchen-living room-bedroom combo, and realizing that he wasn’t sure if Shiro was home or not. He didn’t know how thin the walls were, and he didn’t know how much of what he was saying could be heard by another person through them.

 _“You don’t have to give up masturbation, you just have to—to_ not  _masturbate while thinking about this one specific person! Does this seriously not seem weird to you?!”_

On one hand, it had, he has to admit. But on the other hand—perhaps the one that he’s using now to grip himself through his boxers, as Shiro’s new video loads and he settles more comfortably on his mattress, headphones plugged in, turned up, and stuck into his ears—he can’t imagine that Shiro would be very happy to learn that he’d lost money from a long-time subscriber just because he introduced himself to the guy. Surely, Shiro meets fans all the time. Lance is positive that porn conventions exist. He’s seen pictures of Shiro posing proudly next to the people who come to visit him at panels.

He can’t imagine what the allure of meeting some person who you’ve touched yourself while watching could possibly be, but he _does_  know that all of those people are probably still watching Shiro’s videos to this day. And he knows that Shiro himself surely wouldn’t be too weirded out by it, might be pleased to know, even, that Lance is loyal enough that he’s still willing to stick around despite their new, neighborly relationship.  

And maybe he’s overthinking this. Maybe he’s making a martyr out of himself when surely none of this is even remotely that serious. And maybe Shiro would be freaked out by this, but he doesn’t ever need to know.

Lance isn’t planning on letting him know about any of this any time soon. He’s determined, at the very least, to keep this particular secret between Hunk, his hand, and himself.

And he’s sure that all three of them can keep a secret from Shiro just fine.

The title of Shiro’s newest video catches him by surprise, as he finally clears his thoughts enough to focus on the words under the video player. “Naughty Neighbor” is just as unassuming as all of the others. It gives enough away that he can understand the gist of what’s going to happen before the screen fades into color from black.

But he can’t help but feel as though he’s being targeted somehow—as the guy on the screen who isn’t Commander Ryou shoves up from his couch to answer the door—and the apartment that he sits in is a studio, vastly similar to Lance’s. He’s a guy of average height, lanky build, with brown hair and tanned skin. He looks familiar in a way that Lance doesn’t want to put too much stock into, but in a way that makes him realize with shocking clarity—as the man answers the door, as he immediately drags Commander Ryou inside and tosses him onto the couch with more ease than Lance thinks that anyone his size could manhandle a human freight train like Shiro—exactly what it might look like if he actually managed to pin Shiro down over his own worn out couch. How it would look if he were to climb into Shiro’s lap, to press their lips together, to watch Shiro’s big, agile hands dragging eager palms over the erection already tenting in the front of his pants.

Lance imagines how it might feel to be trapped under Shiro’s gigantic arms, to feel those hands—those warm, soft hands which gripped his only once when Shiro introduced himself—anywhere and everywhere on his body, all at once. He imagines how it might feel to warp Shiro’s gentle, easy smile into something more erotic, something surely not as practiced as the open-mouthed moan that he’s offering in this video. Something more natural, something so impassioned that the pleasure that Shiro might feel while Lance buried himself deep inside of him might even surprise Shiro himself.

Lance’s hand palms himself through his boxers. He cracks open one eye. Shiro’s dulcet moans are booming in his ears, so loud and echoed in the other actor’s empty studio that Lance can almost perfectly envision how it might be to hear Shiro speaking, and laughing, and crying out in pleasure in his own place.

Lance imagines that his hand slipping through the slit of his boxers is bigger, firmer. He imagines that Shiro, the obvious romantic that he is outside of work, would kiss him. He’d take the time to brush his lips over every sliver of Lance’s exposed skin. He’d worship his cock then—eager and leaking precum, Lance shuddering under his experienced touch as Shiro took him between those wet, full,  _hungry_  lips.

And he’d look up at Lance, just as he’s looking up at the camera. He’d wrap a smile around the shaft, reach one of those big hands and work it up under the movements of his mouth. Lance imagines that he could find himself stationed then between Shiro’s knees. He’d barely be able to fit that monster of a dick inside of his mouth. But he’d try his hardest, and Shiro would tell him that he was beautiful. Shiro would brush his sweaty bangs out of his face. Shiro would make him feel as though he were the most beloved person in the entire universe—and they’d rock together then, they’d touch each other. They’d be carried away so desperately by the waves of fervent pleasure that the hours would drizzle by, the sun would fade out into the black of night.

He would teach Shiro what true love really felt like. And Shiro, in turn, would offer up the best, most Earth-shattering orgasm that he’d ever experienced in his twenty-three years of sad handjobs and lonely under-the-blanket tugs.

His hand is already moving quicker than usual. He’s rubbing himself at a hurried pace, biting his lip to mask his various huffs and pants, the half-spoken cries of Shiro’s name tasting so sweet and so forbidden on his lips.

At some point, Commander Ryou just became Shiro. At some point, he fell so much harder for the man in the flesh than that on the screen.

He considers, idly, that he’s taking things entirely too far, but the fantasy melds too gorgeously into reality—the very tangible idea that perhaps one day he really could manage to find himself alone in his apartment with this beautiful creature currently touching himself on Lance’s computer screen.

Shiro winks, turns dark eyes right on Lance’s.

 _“I’ve been a naughty neighbor, haven’t I?”_  he asks then, and Lance nearly chokes on the saliva building in his mouth,  _“Why call the landlord when you can just punish me right now?”_

In some sick semblance of universal serendipity, Lance cums right then and there. He jerks upwards almost violently, trembling as his seed spurts out over his belly, listening to the dull rattle of Shiro’s moans as the other actor pulls him down over his own cock—as he thrusts immediately, as Shiro cries out loudly, desperately, more echoey and less booming in Lance’s ears than he remembers from just seconds ago.

And he doesn’t realize until a few moments too late that he’d accidentally unplugged his headphones from his laptop. Shiro’s keens and cries are booming full blast through his apartment.

With terror, he hears something crash just on the other side of the wall behind his head, then someone walking around, the hard slam of a door jammed closed.

He slams down the lid of his laptop, panicking, entirely too hopped up on adrenaline to function without dropping the computer while grappling with it, when the audio continues despite the computer having been closed.

Finally, he manages to flip it over and remove the battery. The sound dies, but he can’t shake the feeling that it’s already too late.

His heart is pounding so desperately in his chest. He feels as though he just ran a marathon. And vaguely, as his nerves calm and the full, suffocating weight of his latest misstep really settles over him, he can hear the jingling of keys, and someone stepping out of Shiro’s apartment into the hall.

The next morning, he does everything in his power to avoid seeing Shiro on his way to class. He ducks around corners, walks across the top floor to the opposite side, just to take a different elevator down.

However, as he’s fishing his mail from his box in the mail room, intent on shoving it in his bag before he heads off to class, he realizes that life will never have any mercy on him. Every terrible thing can never be avoided, no matter how helplessly he tries to fight it.

It’s entirely too early for Shiro to look so attractive and chipper. It’s entirely too befitting for Shiro to show up just as Lance tugs open his lock. He grabs a small pile of packages from his own box next to Lance’s, and asks—innocently, naively, so accidentally cruel and absolutely soul-crumbling that Lance has trouble believing that he isn’t doing this on purpose, “Is everything okay? It sounded like someone was crying in your apartment last night.”

Lance ducks away immediately, apologizing profusely, refusing to respond, and neglecting to even grab his own mail or lock his box before he’s practically sprinting outside.

For weeks after, he doesn’t leave his apartment unless he’s going to school or work.

And later on, for months of miserable agony on end, he can’t tell if he’s imagining the knowing edge to Shiro’s smile every time that they cross paths.

Would a guy like Shiro be capable of recognizing his own moans through his neighbor’s wall? Is this the first time this has ever happened to Shiro?

Hunk thinks it serves him right. Pidge tells him that this, in and of itself, sounds like the plot to a whole new porno—he’d better keep an eye out, better prepare himself for some royalties if Shiro decides to use his real life misfortunes to sell more skin flicks.

But Lance can’t stop himself from thinking about it for months. And still, for whatever reason, doesn’t cancel his subscription.

Even if he feels like he’s committing a crime every time that he watches a video from then on.

 

* * *

 

 **Instance #3** :  _Shiro might just be fucking with him at this point._

A whopping two months after the dreaded late night porno catastrophe, after a miraculous eight weeks without anything particularly humiliating happening to him, Lance counts his blessings. He tells himself that maybe he and Shiro can, at the very least, learn to just be normal neighbors. That they can move on from this whole “Lance would love nothing more than to fuck him absolutely silly” development and just be regular, friendly acquaintances.

He’s on his way home after a particularly horrible shift at work. It’s summer now, and Lance has opted to skip summer classes in the interest of settling in more comfortably at his new home, saving up some money, and learning how to live by himself with more ease before he struggles with overworking himself. But the summer crowd at the frou frou little boutique where he works—he knows that they’re the worst. He’d been aware of it, while considering his option of taking extra courses over break, and it may or may not have been a very good reason just to continue on with the expected university timeline.

The wealthy mothers drag in their spoiled kids. The teenagers, free from school, wander in boredly and play around with the stock as though they have no idea that one purse alone costs surely more than their parents’ cars.

He’d suffered through the tirade of a soccer mom focusing every ounce of her concentrated menopausal rage on him just before he’d left—for not knowing if the weasels that her prospective bag was made out of were free range or not. He’d tried to reason with her that the fur wasn’t even real, that the plastic, he was sure, had lived a very free and happy life before it was pulled out and twined together, dyed those “natural” colors and woven into the bag that she’d shoved mercilessly into his face, but she wasn’t having any of it.

He’d wondered, in that moment, if anything in the universe could drain his already dwindling faith in humanity faster than customer service. But just as he steps into his building, straying over to the mailroom to check his box, he’s surprised by the blip of a notification on his phone. Commander Ryou had uploaded a new video, just a few hours ago, and he notes this with much rising spirits, glancing around the room before pulling up the link on his phone.

He isn’t depraved enough to actually watch the footage out in public, but idly, he looks through the brief synopsis and the comments as he nears his mailbox. It’s some kind of Doctor-Patient roleplay, he learns, and the reviews of it look more than promising. He tells himself that, if anything else, he can salvage the mangled remains of this day with a little bit of self care—he can open up the new face mask that he’d gotten on sale while out shopping with Hunk. He can pour himself a bottle of wine. He can use the bath salts that his sister got him for his birthday, rub himself down with his favorite coconut-scented lotion, and then, once he’s nice and zen and free of today’s looming stressors, tucked away comfortably in his happy place, he can turn on Shiro’s new video and enjoy a nice, romantic night with his favorite person—the always reliable, always understanding and fantastically charming Lance McClain.

He’s zoning out as he scrolls through the comments, reaching up to blindly turn the combination to the lock on his mailbox. He’s jarred out of his thoughts only by warm skin meeting his outstretched fingers. And he jerks back so quickly that his phone flies from his hand—skittering to the floor, landing, of course, face up—onto the thumbnail of Commander Ryou spread out on a doctor’s table, ass up in the air.

His heart stops. Ice water runs at rapid speed through his veins.

And he looks up suddenly to the person standing in front of him—Shiro, of course, because why the fuck not? Why wouldn’t this inherently cursed day just continue getting worse and worse for him? Why would he ever imagine that he could think about Shiro without the guy mysteriously popping up right in front of him just seconds later?

To Shiro’s credit, he only spares Lance’s phone a short glance. He’s smiling, as though nothing weird has just happened, flushing lightly as he apologizes for startling Lance.

As though this truly is a nightmare—as though this really is the  _Access Hollywood Special: The True Story of How Lance McClain Finally Lost His Faith in the Universe and Burned His Entire Apartment Complex to the Ground_ —Shiro bends over again, making a point of turning off the screen on Lance’s phone as he scoops it from the floor and hands it back to him.

“I—I’m really sorry,” Shiro tells him, as Lance weakly grasps his phone from Shiro’s hands—with just the tips of his fingers, as though he’s accepting a dog turd in place of the expensive piece of machinery that he’d saved up three paychecks to afford, “I called your name, but maybe I wasn’t loud enough… I, uh—”

Shiro reaches up and scratches the back of his head, more color rising to his cheeks.

“I noticed that you looked kind of upset. And I feel like it’s my neighborly duty to make sure that nothing’s wrong.”

He laughs then—that melodious, possessing laugh. That laugh that’s haunted Lance’s most forbidden dreams since the first time he was blessed enough to hear it.

Lance swallows thickly, shaking off his nerves. And then, entirely too loudly, he clears his throat, stepping back to put some distance between them, as though Shiro’s entire beautiful body is some kind of jammer that’s blocking all coherent thought.

“I-It’s fine, I… I just had a bad day at work. Customer service, you know?”

He isn’t sure if Shiro knows or not. Frankly, he has no idea if Shiro ever did anything before he did porn at all, or if maybe he was created in some sort of lab just to be the most gorgeous man imaginable, then thrust out before the cameras to perform.

But Shiro’s smile pulls tighter at the edges, he glances off to the side, his eyes faraway as though he’s picturing some memory projected against the bulletin boards just over Lance’s shoulder.

“Ah, I know all about the service industry,” Shiro tells him, his voice light and airy as though he isn’t completely aware that he’s even speaking now, “I’ve had to service a lot of people in my time, and it can be difficult, can’t it? There’s no reasonable way to predict what every individual might want, what’s going to finish them off quickly and leave them satisfied.”

Lance isn’t sure if this is a euphemism or not. He almost blurts,  _“We both know that you do porn, okay? You know that I know about it. You can stop being coy about it.”_  But thankfully, he cuts himself off just in time.

The very horrible, self-hating part of himself wants to see where this goes. The part of himself that loves his own misery is eager to hear exactly what Shiro has to say about “leaving people satisfied” even though he’s completely positive that most normal people don’t get boners just from having work-related conversations with their neighbors.

“It’s hard, pleasing people. Especially when it gets crowded, right? Servicing multiple people at once makes things even more complicated, but the satisfaction of fulfilling all of their needs in the end is really what makes it worth it, isn’t it?”

He claps a hand on Lance’s shoulder. Lance regrets not nipping this conversation in the bud very early on. He’d had a myriad of excuses to choose from. He could have said that he’d forgotten something at work—that he had online classes to attend to, that his mother had called him and he needed to call her back. But he’d allowed that opportunity to pass him by, like an idiot. Like a total, absolute buffoon.

And now, it takes everything within him not to melt into an indiscernible puddle, when he feels the warmth and weight of Shiro’s hand, blocked from touching his skin only by the flimsy material of his work shirt. He shudders a breath, making yet another mountainous mistake—he looks Shiro in the eyes.

Shiro is still smiling that soft smile. Shiro is so much more beautiful up close.

Lance experiences such an intimate relationship with his own mortality in this split instance that life, and being alive, feel like nothing but a distant memory.

“I can tell that you’re a people-pleaser too,” Shiro says then, no indication that this is all some big, evil prank even remotely evident in his tender, even tone, “I bet, at the end of the day, everyone who meets you leaves satisfied.”

Lance isn’t proud to admit that he’d bolted immediately after. No explanation, as per usual. Shiro had been so startled when Lance had shoved his arm off that he hadn’t even tried to call after him.

But when Lance returns to his apartment, when he locks his door behind him and steadies his breathing, he foregoes the bath, the face mask, the coconut-scented lotion.

And he isn’t proud of the fact that he immediately makes his way to his computer and loads one of Shiro’s few group sex videos. He isn’t proud to say that he spends a lot of time considering each and every one of Shiro’s words.

No one knows about it but himself and his hand, he’s well aware.

But even still, the mere idea of it still manages to keep him up for many, many nights.

 

* * *

 

 **Instance #4** : _Commander Ryou Humiliates Horny College Freshman at the Grocery Store_

Six months after the initial hazing of Lance McClain into the apartment complex by renowned myth, man, legend: the always beautiful and suspiciously suggestive Takashi Shirogane, Lance finds that things have settled into a relatively comfortable routine.

He just expects to humiliate himself when he’s around Shiro, anymore. He takes his self-made misery in something that could perhaps be considered akin to stride. Shiro persists as a genuinely nice person, seeming as though he’ll take every opportunity to ignore Lance’s weird behavior in favor of treating him as though he’s even remotely capable of talking and acting like a decent human being.

And Lance tries his best not to gape at him too much, while he talks to him about the mundane, neighborly things that Shiro brings up in the mornings when they pass each other in the hall, the evenings when they meet in the mailroom, the short respite of heaven on Earth that Lance sometimes spends with him in the elevator.

They’ve fallen into something that Lance feels bold enough to perhaps even call a burgeoning friendship. They laugh about the old lady at the end of the hall who dresses her tiny yorkie into a new, flashy outfit every time that she goes out on the town. They gossip about the couple across the hall who always seems like they’re either fighting or madly in love. Lance feels his annoyance alleviated when he steps in tiny pellets of yorkie droppings in the elevator—when he’s kept up late on school nights by the fighting from across the hall. When he finds himself able to vent about these annoyances to Shiro, and have those feelings validated with kindness, with quiet, guilty jokes at their expense, Lance finds that it’s easy to consider that Shiro is just a normal person, just like him, but… obviously a lot better.

Things aren’t weird just because he knows what Shiro’s mouth looks like wrapped around a dick. Nothing has to be awkward just because he’s seen Shiro with three fingers in his own ass. He imagines that anything outlandish enough can become normal after a person is exposed to it long enough. He thinks that, maybe, this time next year, he won’t even be embarrassed anymore when he stumbles over his words or exposes his own interest in Shiro’s career.

And maybe, someday, Shiro will actually address said proverbial elephant in the room—that Lance has obviously seen his porn. That, quite a few times now, Lance hasn’t focused on his mail well enough while chatting with Shiro in the mailroom to notice that his letter from his  _Commander Ryou_ subscription was right on top of the pile—just where Shiro’s gaze has flicked two or three times at the beginning of their conversations, before he seems to catch himself and trains his eyes back on Lance’s face.

Despite everything working so meticulously to make things between the two of them as uncomfortable as possible, Lance finds that their friendship has grown only stronger. Soon enough, he thinks, hopefully, helplessly, like a pathetic schoolgirl with a crush, maybe he’ll actually garner the nerve to invite Shiro out somewhere—as friends, sure. At first, just platonically.

But maybe… after enough time passes…

He shakes his head, jumping back from his thoughts in the clouds to his current standing position in the grocery store just a block and a half from his apartment building. This place is so close and convenient that it feels as though it’s a second home. It’s like some kind of depressing public convention held only for the people who live in his building, with how often he sees their familiar faces here. He spots them shopping for the same discount bread that he places in his own cart, the same canned vegetables and frozen microwave meals, as though they could ever consider themselves lowly enough to do the same mundane errands that the normal, working class folk lower themselves to twice every month.

Lance likes seeing them here, in a way. It humanizes the people in his building. It reminds him, after feeling sometimes as though he’s a single dark smear on such a highbrow place, that at the end of the day, even his wealthy neighbors need to eat. And even the richest person still needs groceries—even if they pay someone else to shop for them.

And today, he’s decided that he’s going to make a salad. It’s one of the simpler recipes in his cookbook, something so easy that he was surprised to even see it printed on the glossy pages. But it calls for a few ingredients that he wouldn’t have considered before—zucchini and baby carrots, grilled chicken and just a small portion of peas. He isn’t too sure how good all of that might be when tossed together and drizzled in caesar dressing, but the price tag is looking cheap enough so far that he’s still willing to try it. And he has to admit that anything sounds better than ramen noodles right now—even if the finished product doesn’t taste as wonderful as it has looked on the page.

So right now, he’s fondling zucchini. The recipe had specifically mentioned finding one that was “firm and robust”—which he thinks translates in cookbook lingo to something akin to “not mushy and rotten”.

He’s inspecting it probably a lot closer than he should be, pulling his cart close to himself as he grasps at it, squeezing it with both hands lightly enough that he won’t accidentally crush it, but completely unprepared for how little he knows about the softness or hardness that’s considered optimal in this particular vegetable. And this is how Shiro finds him—of course, because Shiro couldn’t have stumbled over while he was weighing the baby carrots, or fumbling through the bags of chicken breasts in the freezers. Of course, Shiro would have to approach him now, when he realizes belatedly that he’s been making a whole lot of suggestive, borderline perverse gestures with this very lucky zucchini.

“Cooking something good tonight?” Shiro always opens with small talk. Every single time. It doesn’t matter if Lance is reading the comments on his latest porn video, or if he’s double-fisting a vegetable like it’s his second chance to impress his prom date when he was eighteen behind the bowling alley at 3am. It doesn’t matter how humiliated Lance appears to be—Shiro always addresses him friendly, calm. Collected as though none of this is even remotely bizarre to him.

Quickly, Lance decides that this zucchini is perfectly fine. It’ll be good, it doesn’t matter. He practically slam dunks it into his cart.

“Y-yeah, uh… just a salad. It’s no big deal.”

_I promise I’m a real adult and this isn’t the extent of my culinary prowess._

“Salad is good.” Shiro is leaning against the handlebars of his own cart. Though a normal person, given Lance’s deviant track record with Shiro thus far, might suspect that the zucchini won’t ever actually make it into this supposed salad, and might be used instead for more perverted reasons, Shiro doesn’t seem doubtful at all.

It’s not that he doesn’t care, and it’s not like Lance has never seen things that definitely aren’t made for asses in Shiro’s ass, but—

He’s just a nice guy. He’s just kind enough that he doesn’t ever seem to suspect the worst of anyone—least of all, Lance, who most definitely would deserve it.

Lance combs his fingers through his hair, forcing down his nerves.

“Salad is good, yeah, that’s… that’s why I’m making it.”

Shiro offers him a laugh that doesn’t sound even an ounce condescending, even as Lance’s skin heats up surely even hotter than the rotisserie chickens, rotating on their spits just a few feet away.

“So, I take it that you have the evening off then. Any plans?”

Lance, of course, can’t bring himself to think before he speaks. As the reasonable, socially conscious Lance inside of him screams in slow motion as he watches this proverbial plane crash taking place, the words tumble clumsily, quickly and tactlessly from his lips.

He should have known that his loose lips among his friends would someday come back to bite him in the ass. The fact that he’d never been particularly quiet about his more deviant interests, perhaps just to gross them out, was surely something that wouldn’t allow him to live without suffering for long. It’s karma, really. It’s exactly what Hunk and Pidge would tell him that he deserves.

But he never would have imagined that he’d be paying that penance like this—saying, so bluntly, so idiotically, so dreadfully  _public_ and so horrifyingly _right to Shiro’s face_ :

“There’s a new _Commander Ryou_ video out, so I’ll probably just watch that.”

Lance makes a quick mental note to read the wikihow page on “How to Become a Recluse” once he gets home. Previous plans be damned, he needs to give his landlord his month’s notice ASAP. Maybe he should just pick a direction and start walking, with only the clothes on his back, the tainted zucchini, the few items already in his cart.

Shiro’s laughter is surprised, but nowhere near as offended or disgusted as he thinks that it should be. He practically spits out that laugh, his cheeks growing so red that he seems almost more embarrassed than Lance is right now.

“You really don’t think it’s weird?” Shiro asks him, and before Lance can ramp his plans from eternal solitude to seppuku, he adds hurriedly, “I mean… my job? You know, the last guy who lived in your apartment moved out as soon as his lease ran out. He avoided me like the plague, said it was gross living next door to someone like me because he could  _‘feel the diseases in the walls’_ or something like that.”

Lance balks—blinking a few times in quick succession as the brakes in his brain squeal to a sudden halt, and his thoughts jam up at rapid speed, piling together as he struggles desperately to pick through them. It takes him a few moments too long to catch up to where the conversation has ended up—with Shiro, of all people, asking him if he thinks that their situation is odd.

Not because of his own gross behavior, but because of Shiro’s job.

He shakes his head quickly back and forth, trusting only his reflexes before he manages to find the right words to say.

The awkward, humiliating words, but the words that somehow manage to make Shiro feel better anyway.

“N-no, it’s not weird! I-I mean, I think it’s kind of weird that I’m still watching your videos, isn’t it? Like, I know that’s not really you—I mean it’s  _you_ , but it’s… it’s like _your persona_ . I know you aren’t actually, you know… the kind of guy who you are in your videos, but I-I mean… you’re a really nice guy, and I like talking to you, and… and I guess there isn’t really an excuse for how many times I’ve masturbated to you, but I’ve kinda been a subscriber for like six years and I can’t really find anyone else who does it as good as you do, so… I like you, and I like ‘ _job you’_ , too. And I don’t think it’s, like… uncomfortable living by you or anything. I think you’re a really good neighbor.”

His eyes are wide by now, his lips moving a mile a minute. He’s painfully aware of the fact that he’s babbling, that Shiro is allowing him to babble, and that people are staring now—polite enough to pretend that they’re scrutinizing the labels on the backs of cereal boxes or the individual fibers of the fruits and vegetables in their hands, but Lance can feel their eyes burning tiny holes into him nonetheless. He can practically hear the sizzle of his skin under their collective gazes.

It takes every ounce of his self control to force himself to shut up. He feels so hot by the time that he clamps his mouth shut that he thinks he might have the power to melt straight through the tiles in the floor.

“You’re a very genuine person, Lance,” Shiro says then, catching him so off-guard that he nearly topples over into the zucchini bin, “I like that about you. I have to admit, I’ve never met a fan who I’d also want to be friends with. Don’t get me wrong, a lot of fans are nice, but… I don’t think anyone has ever treated me as much like just another person as you do.”

Lance finds that hard to believe, but he isn’t particularly willing or coherent enough to look this particular gift horse in the mouth.

He only nods weakly, offering up a pitiful squeak of a noise in confirmation.

Shiro pushes his cart forward slightly, dithering for a moment as though he has any right to be nervous in this situation. After a moment of apparent contemplation, or perhaps, if Lance allows himself to dream, building himself up to speaking again, he takes a deep breath, straightening his posture and brushing a few stray strands of hair from his face.

“You know, I don’t have anything going on tonight either, so… if you wanna come over for dinner, maybe we could watch a movie?”

And before Lance can affirm this eagerly, Shiro adds, quickly, with much visible embarrassment, “—Not one of mine, but… I have pay per view.”

They’re both mortified that he needs to affirm that. Lance can see it on Shiro’s face, and he can feel it in the way that his heart skips a few very crucial beats. But Lance squawks out some meager excuse for a  _“yes, of course, I’d love to”_  before Shiro gives him a time, suggests a movie that he’s been wanting to watch, and tells Lance that he’s looking forward to seeing him tonight.

It takes a lot of inner strength to stop himself from hooting and hollering his success and his joy once Shiro wheels his cart away. It takes every ounce of his cognitive capabilities not to pinch himself a thousand times, just to make sure that this isn’t a dream.

But in the final log of Lance’s mental catalog of humiliating moments, he’s always wondered if this last one really deserves to be included at all.

Especially when, around this time next year, when he’s lying awake at night and considering all of his regretful mistakes, he’s doing so while wrapped up in Shiro’s big, warm arms.

**Author's Note:**

> This story was requested by the always very lovely, always so charming [Kris](http://superslimeys.tumblr.com)! It's my first Shance story as well, which was a lot of fun to finally get a chance to write!
> 
> I hope this wasn't 'too' painful, but she told me to make it hurt... I hope I did a good job!
> 
> Thank you so much for reading! I hope you enjoyed it!
> 
> [tumblr](http://curionabang.tumblr.com), [twitter](https://twitter.com/MothIsland)


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